Watching the world go by

This one hasn’t been finished just not sure of what direction to go exactly (medium wise).  The drawing is a sort of flashback image I had in therapy.  I don’t remember what the conversation was just that all of a sudden I was dissociating back to preschool.  I was watching all my little classmates run around and have fun, I wanted so much to join them but I was to afraid.  This happened a lot in my school years.  Instead of joining in with my classmates I often sat back watching, floating off into my own little world.  This memory/flashback was really upsetting to me all the feelings of loneliness and fear came rushing at me.  I guess dissociating was how I dealt with it back then but this time I had to face the feelings full force.  One of the hard things was trying to communicate what was going on and communicate with this part of me because, this was a part of me that can’t or won’t speak.  She just sits eyes wide absorbing everything she sees, trying to get attention and remain unassuming/”invisible” at the same time.

Cut Short - Unfinished Pencil

This image came from thinking about how I felt about my mom, feeling like my growing was cut in someway.  I think it’s just feeling like I’m not at all supported.  Originally the axe was supposed to be sort of flying through and chopping the tree, and I think there was supposed to be a small sprout coming out of the stump.  It’s not quite done, still being fiddled with.

I was trying to get motivated to try and attempt a self-portrait, I don’t like doing them.  I decided to in a way to give up and just try drawing something.  This is what happened.  It’s pretty funny if you actually know me or looked at some earlier posts, maybe even read my “About Me”.  Definitely this  is nothing like me.  The odd thing was when I was done…it looks just like one of my more unknown inner parts.  It’s one of those parts that I think hides so, much of the time I wonder if she really exists or not.  This makes that part seem more real though.  Maybe it can be a little link to her.

Late night painting

Late night painting

These two were just random late night paintings.  Just kind of did them with no real point in mind except to see what happened when I put a brush to paper.  The only thing in mind was feelings of an inner part, hoping that maybe painting would help.  The first one was about feelings of self-harm.  It’s kind of funny because there was a drawing from earlier in the year that was done in the same colors, all colors that I don’t like which was on purpose.  This time they were picked at random.  The red is the anger, rage, the yellow had something to do with spirits or something spiritual, I forget what the green was, I think the brown was about darkness.  I want to say the green was something about grounding and perhaps the brown too.

The second painting was even more random. I think I was just about ready to go to bed when that one happened.  Don’t remember much about it except it was something about feelings toward my mom.  I remember listening to the sound of the brush making the red streaks that look like flowers and hearing something say it sounded like whispering.  There was something about the whispering sound being all the secrets kept being put down on the paper.  The red again being the anger about those secrets.  I think the green and yellow represent the same things in this painting as the first.

This is one of the ones that came from the “Art as a way of knowing” book exercises.  I was thinking about love and loss and just started to doodle away while thinking about those feelings/topic.  There is a peacock thing and then this weird ugly bird in front of it that doesn’t seem to know if it’s a bird or a snake.  Then there are some strange paisley tears and I guess that’s a person (on the left in sorta of a purple) or …something ha!

I’ve been reading this book my therapist gave me, “Art as a Way of Knowing”, I’m not sure how much I really like it though.  I like the fact that she mentions how art is such a judgement loaded word and can really turn some people off.  That would be me!  She says she tends to use the words images or image making so people won’t limit themselves, which is good but it gets a little annoying after awhile.  I think after awhile the whole book starts to feel a little too new agey for me.  She has this method that she uses of setting an intention (I’d like to know more about my inner critic, for example) and then you just set about making ‘marks’ on the page and let whatever comes, come.  Sometimes this works ok, other times I don’t know…  I mean ’scribbling on a page can be fun and interesting but sometimes it’s just …scribbles.  I’ll probably finish reading it but, I can’t say I’m going to be trying anything else out from the book.  I think no doubt I’ll still let myself goof around and scribble as that’s about all I feel comfortable doing here in my moms house.  I think I’m gonna move on to my other two art books though and see what they have to offer.  I might put up to examples of things that came out of this book experience though.  Stay tuned.

I did these two drawings on the same day. I can’t remember what was going on, I think maybe it was around the time my dad was coming out to see me at school.  I remember that period of time being really frantic to pack up anything that might be lying about on DID, PTSD or me. This kind of picture comes into my head a lot though when I feel like I want to talk to someone about me and my history.  This two came out pretty quickly though, for some reason when they popped into my head I thought they would take a while to do.

Phone conversation with mom - pen

The story behind that question is that the little sister of a friend of mine passed on a certain annoying bug that get’s passed between little kids.  Yes, so much fun …almost the entire class got head lice from that girl! The stuff you use to get rid of it has a warning lable on it saying not to get it in your eye or it could cause blindness. Well, I played the “what if” game even as a kid. I was pretty convinced that it would get in my eyes and I’d go blind.  I had it in my head that I was just a magnet for bad things. I don’t even know what I meant by that back then so, it’s one of those things that throws up some red flags for me. Growing up I had a lot of nightmares surrounding this question of “why me?”. I don’t remember why my mom brought it up in this recent conversation with her but it did.  I replied back to her that I still thought that way.  I tried to explain that I didn’t feel that was entirely a negative thing (after she said I needed to change that thought).  Like I was writing the other day in Becoming Hypervigilant in some ways it’s kept me safe. In some ways it’s let me do things I might not do.  Sounds weird maybe but I think that I tend to prepare more and I am often surprised by life since, because of this I often doen’t have a lot of expectations for things.  I don’t know if that makes sense to other people, though.  I tell people I’m a pessamistic optimist, I think the worst knowing the best will happen.  I know when I was little though it wasn’t like that, I truely thought only the worst would ever happen.

Agg I got distracted and forgot I was gonna work on this so, here goes:

How I feel about home - Pen

I’m not putting these in any order, the pastel drawings were pretty much in order from the first to the last. I’m just gonna throw these up here as I get them watermarked and what not.

So …some of us feel more comfortable with straight up stick people (You might be able to see that some of the pastel drawings start as stick people but get filled/fleshed in. Some of us aren’t that patient or good lol! We are slowly learning how to build on shapes like the others were taught in old art classes.) I’ll put up some of my crap attempts later lol! More faceless people too, faces on our stick figures never feel right either.

This one I did when I came home on a break from school.  I just felt like I was going to be suffocated, smushed, etc, by everything here.  My mom, my dad, my brother, just being afraid of this city in general, everything.  I felt like I was trapped here for that short time with no escape. In the top left corner of the press it’s labled home.

Representation of Us - Pastel and Construction paper

I think I had meant to stick this up a while ago but forgot. This one was supposed to go along with the one of the ball of light.  It was meant to represent that inside part as well as it represents all of us and how we work/function.  It’s made up of lots of dots each trying to stay in it’s own seperate line but, some of them end up blending together, the swirling in and out of each section, kind of like how each part sometimes flows fluidly (both to front and also in terms of ‘jobs’). It might kind of look messy and chaotic but, it’s not always.